Let’s start off by saying this book was average. I know this is harsh, but it’s true.

I did not love the book for a multitude of reasons. The information was fine, and the writing was good, but nothing about it was overly special. I found it was loaded with anecdotes and stories that seemed to just belabor an obvious point. Maybe that is the issue, I might be done with ‘social science’ writing.

I go through phases with books. We live in the information age and we have an overload of information around singular topics. I have become numb to a book’s content due to the pure nature of how excessive and redundant it has been. This is not the pragmatist in me yearning for bullet points and fewer stories to get to the point. It is that this book is probably extremely unnecessary. It is merely the compiling of information from other sources that is filtered through the authors’ perception and interpretation. Who is to say that this author is nothing more than AI consolidating Google search into 10 chapters and the author just adds personal stories to make the central theme more memorable? What value does this book have in the grand scheme of things? It just feels like a publisher went to a couple of guys and said ‘Hey dopamine is hot right now, write me a 300-page book on it.” The authors then went on chadgpt, experienced his with ‘culture’ books. The classic is ‘There is no such thing as business ethics, there is just ethics’, then proceed to write 400 pages of dribble circling back to the original point. Or the slight edge, just do a little bit more. Or energy bus, just be positive. What’s the point? how is that of benefit to the world? Now have we gone from Hemmingway and Rand to Jon Gordon?

I guess I am just disappointed with the level of effort put into a book nowadays. My hope going into this was to understand the biochemistry associated with Dopamine, not the societal impacts of people with higher levels of dopamine being more driven or inventive. One good point made by the authors was about the prevalence of bipolar disorder within the United States. The theory was centered around bipolar being an inability to manage dopamine levels consistently. This can lead to extreme energy and enthusiasm towards an outcome matched with extreme drops in energy and depression to do anything. United States is predominantly immigrants and that has to come from people with extreme motivation to be willing to start new and build something. So it makes a lot of sense that the United States has a higher percentage of people with bipolar disorder than Europe, Asia, and Africa with more native populations.

Is it fair to be overly critical of a book that is good technically, just not special? Maybe that is the dopamine in me that is driving me to say something interesting and provocative? Maybe it is just average and time is valuable and it should not be wasted on things that are not going amaze you. I write strength training programs. I write blogs. I write books. I write captions on social media. I write texts. I write emails. All of those represent time consumed by the participant reading them. It is a sign of respect to me that they would stop and read what I write. Reciprocity means I take time to write something worthy of that time.